Read Full Report in NewYork Times
Pressuring Myanmar’s Military
A drawing by a Rohingya boy, depicting the experiences he endured while fleeing from Myanmar to Bangladesh, at the Balukhali makeshift refugee camp outside Cox Bazaar, Bangladesh, this month. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
The plight of the Rohingya people in Myanmar is one of those wrenching tragedies that beggars understanding. The State Department has already blocked some senior Myanmar military leaders from entering the United States and is considering economic measures against officers and officials responsible for continuing atrocities against the Rohingya. This should be done without delay — the brutal repression of this Muslim minority has already driven more than 600,000 people out of Myanmar, exposing them to acute suffering and stretching the resources and patience of neighboring Bangladesh. And more keep fleeing.
Yet so deeply rooted is the loathing of the Rohingya in Buddhist-majority Myanmar that there seems to be little chance that even the sternest sanctions would halt the persecution. As Hannah Beech so starkly reported in The Times, the people of Myanmar seem to almost universally share an image of the Rohingya as illegal, violent and fast-multiplying aliens, even their neighbors in Rakhine State, where the Rohingya have lived for generations.
The huge body of well-documented reports detailing the Myanmar Army’s campaign of killing, raping and arson in Rakhine, in western Myanmar, is dismissed by much of the country’s population as hostile foreign misinformation. The campaign may have begun as a response to raids on some border posts by a nascent insurgent organization called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, but the retaliation has amounted to what a United Nations official termed ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch recently reported that satellite imagery has shown 288 Rohingya villages set ablaze.
To the dismay of the many people around the world who supported her during her years of heroic resistance to military dictatorship, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi purports to be mystified why “numbers of Muslims are fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.” It is arguable that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who is the top civilian official in a government in which the military still maintains absolute control over security and the civil service, has no power over the campaign against the Rohingya and is wary of risking the modest moves toward democratic rule by confronting the army. There were reports that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had agreed in a meeting on Tuesday with Bangladesh officials to halt the flight of refugees and to work to restore “normalcy” in Rakhine for their resettlement.
That would be a good idea, but it will require persuading the Rohingya that their persecution will really halt if they return. That is something only the Myanmar generals can do, and for that they need to be persuaded that continuing to ostracize, oppress and demonize the Rohingya carries a direct and serious penalty.
No comments:
Post a Comment